The master of a very notable pack of foxhounds died. He had been master for something like thirty years; his father was master before him, and his son is master after him. A man of intense love of the sport. In the dining-room hang the portraits of three generations, all in pink. He died and was buried amidst universal sorrow. Of course the pack did not go out that week. The first meet after the funeral was at a distance of very many miles. The fox was started, and ran, straight as an arrow, towards the residence of the late master, ran through the park, pursued by the hounds, ran across the garden to the churchyard, ran to the vault, and took refuge against the iron door that closed it, and concealed the coffin of the dead M.F.H. And there, against his vault door, the fox was killed, and the yelping, bounding, barking pack careered within a few feet of his coffin. This story I believe to be perfectly true. It was a coincidence, and a singular one. Till the end of the seventeenth century fox-hunting can scarcely be said to have existed as a sport in England, the stag, the buck, and the hare taking the precedence with our forefathers as objects of the chase, which in a still earlier period had included the wolf and the boar. And yet I have over my hall fireplace, in the carved oak chimney-piece, a representation of a fox-hunt that certainly belongs to the reign of Elizabeth. The hunters are armed with pitchforks, or something much like them; one is holding back a greyhound by a leash; another is winding a horn. There are ten dogs in the pack, long-eared beagles or dachshunds, it is hard to say what. The fox has eaten one goose all but the head and wings, and has killed a second, and is taking refuge in a pinery among the pine-apples. Our deer-parks about the great mansions are the remnants of deer-parks or chases that were originally found about the manor-houses in most places. They were not always very extensive, very often were only small paddocks where the deer were kept; and one was let run occasionally for a grand chase. These old paddocks with the ruined walls about them, or without, when they were surrounded by palings, that have long ago rotted away, still go by the name of the Chase, and so remind us of the sports of our forefathers.